Entertainment

SciVee's Science Videos Get More Interactive With Virtual Posters

How’s this for science trivia. SciVee, a science video upload site that’s been steadily growing itself for about a year now, has just this week unveiled a new option for users to upload feature material in the form of “postercasts” that enable users to complement their traditional video presentations with an interactive documentation component. The synchronous delivery of these is remarkably user-friendly.

SciVee offers quite a few viewing options to users not including the postercast dimension. Many are quite useful, too. If, say, you click a typical link on SciVee, you’ll generally see a normal-sized video, or a miniaturized video with a text-based column in the main column of the page. These layouts are sensible, particularly when the subject matter warrants prioritization of one component over another. Yet, what a postercast upload does is give viewers a large-size graphic that triggers a full-screen experience. I don’t think it’s too much to say that this is something which will pique the interest of quite a few site members and prospective registrants.

Now, SciVee isn’t likely to be out-and-out mauled by hits because of this addition to its toolset. Though Web video viewers are no strangers to scientific experiments, they’re normally more transfixed by YouTube-bound delights. The Mentos-plus-Coke mix, for one, which brought many millions of people to YouTube’s archive. Chemistry gone viral, so to speak. But some would likely prefer a more exclusive venue to observe science-related activities, particularly those with educational and serious academic connotations. So they’ll go to SciVee. Or JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments), a site that recently grabbed the interest of the National Library of Medicine and commissioned to index the repositories of MEDLINE and PubMed.

It’s been proven in a number of cases that online efforts in the networking and media worlds to address niche interests is effective in building devoted communities. It is the classic outlook that the value of the long tail is high. And SciVee, as well as JoVE, seem to exploit the sector well, in focus and in delivery. SciVee, it should be said, makes for a remarkably stronger impact insofar as user experience, and a good bit more with Postercasts involved. But both are thorough in addressing their core pursuits.

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